"The prevailing global system, then, today
faces an unwelcome choice. Either it trusts its native pragmatism in
the face of its enemy’s absolutism, or it falls back on metaphysical
values of its own-values that are looking increasingly tarnished and
implausible. Does the West need to go full-bloodedly metaphysical to
save itself? And if it does, can it do so without inflicting too much
damage on its liberal, secular values, thus ensuring there is still
something worth protecting from its illiberal opponents?

If Marxism once held out a promise of
reconciling culture and civilization, it is partly because its founder
was both a Romantic humanist and an heir of Enlightenment rationalism.
Marxism is about culture and civilization together-sensuous
particularity and universality, worker and citizen of the world, local
allegiances and international solidarity, the free self-realization of
flesh-and-blood individuals and a global cooperative commonwealth of
them. But Marxism has suffered in our time a staggering political
rebuff; and one of the places to which those radical impulses have
migrated is-of all things-theology. In theology nowadays, one can find
some of the most informed and animated discussions of Deleuze and
Badiou, Foucault and feminism, Marx and Heidegger. That is not entirely
surprising, since theology, however implausible many of its truth
claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an
increasingly specialized world-one whose subject is nothing less than
the nature and transcendental destiny of humanity itself. These are not
issues easily raised in analytic philosophy or political science.
Theology’s remoteness from pragmatic questions is an advantage in this
respect.

We find ourselves, then, in a most curious
situation. In a world in which theology is increasingly part of the
problem, it is also fostering the kind of critical reflection which
might contribute to some of the answers. There are lessons that the
secular Left can learn from religion, for all its atrocities and
absurdities; and the Left is not so flush with ideas that it can afford
to look such a gift horse in the mouth. But will either side listen to
the other at present? Will Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins read
this and experience an epiphany that puts the road to Damascus in the
shade? To use two theological terms by way of response: not a hope in
hell. Positions are too entrenched to permit such a dialogue. Mutual
understanding cannot happen just anywhere, as some liberals tend to
suppose. It requires its material conditions. And it seems unlikely
these will emerge as long as the so-called war on terror continues to
run its course.

The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins
and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal
humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can
only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be
free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a
generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision
of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is
possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of
humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned
post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth
saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag
with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin.
Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic
varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and
radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no
guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it
might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire
flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its
way."

Which is why, my friends, I ultimately believe more in Buddhism than liberal politics, but remain open to both.